Professor Nik Bessis founded EHU's Computer Science department and led it to a number of top scores awards in NSS from 2017 onwards. From a bottom score (GP 1.39*) in REF14,  Nik led his department's REF21 submission be the most improved UoA nationally. The overall score of 2.5* led the department reach a TOP50 rank in UK research intensive league tables (at that time), an improvement of about 40 places up. He initiated and was also instrumental to the successful application for a Athena Swan bronze award (2018). During his term as a Head of Department, he led his department become a benchmark for the quality of research produced and for the increase of the amount of research and knowledge transfer contracts (from £35k to over £5m). Alongside successes in research, Nik managed to grow his Department's annual intake from 70 to nearly 250 students. He increased the staffing critical mass from 14 to 48. During his term, the Department received significant external reccognition both in leagues tables and TEF metrics, i.e. top 10 in student satisfaction, continuation (96%) etc.  He led the Department receive about a £1m to work with Institute of Code (IoC), DoE/OfS on upskilling Women in Science.

He received his BA from the T.E.I. of Athens, Greece and his MA and PhD degrees from De Montfort University, UK in 1995 and 2002 respectively. In 2015, he completed a HE Management course from Harvard Universitty Graduae School of Education. He is a full Professor of Computer Science (2015-) and was the founding Head of the Department of Computer Science (2015-2021) and the founding Head of the Department of Engineering (2018-2021) at Edge Hill University, UK .

In his current capacity as a Senior Advisor, Professor Bessis (2022-) leads several initiatives related to digital transformation strategy (i.e. Future Learn), external engagement and research strategy including partnerships (both academic and non-academic).  He advices on the implementation of the University 2023-30 Research Strategy. In 2025, he introduced the 2025-2030 STEM research strategy which is based on the importance of external collaboration, external engagement, people developement, impact and working with industry. In his capacity as a peer group member of the European Universities Association (EUA), Council for Doctoral Education, he has been invited to co-develop the framework for extending external engagement in doctoral studies to include collaborating and working together with organisations beyond academia (i.e. industry). As part of the same agenda, he has initiated, developed and implemented (2024-) AAA (Aid Action Alliance), an international multi-institutional alliance on Data Science and AI research for global and societal challenges. AAA encompasses several UK and non-UK institutions including non-academic institutions such as the Business Connect (Innovate UK) and UKRN (funded by REF), EAAL and Warestack ltd. AAA involves a multi-intitutional research institute, multi-institutional doctoral training centres and online training. AAA also looks at staff exchanges including internships in industry. He is also the Director of the Multi-institutional Research Insrtitute on Data Science & AI for Global & Societal Challenges. In 2024, he became the Inaugural Institutional Lead (2024-) for UKRN and OR4 projects and invited to be a member of the organisation committee (representing ILs) of the inaugural UKRN conference in 2026. He is a founding member (2024-) of the NW sustainability in computing group, a national initiative run by Business Connect, UK. He is the founding Director of the interdisciplinary Data Science research centre (2018-) involving several departments across the University and was the Director of the Data and Complex Systems research centre (2017-2022). Income generated from both Centres exceeds £7m of external funding from UKRI, EPSRC, ESRC, Innovate UK, BA, BC, Horizon and Horizon Europe etc. He is coaching and mentoring senior staff (Profs and Managers) at the University.

He is a fellow of HEA, BCS and a senior member of IEEE. He has substantial external examiner experience in UK Universities and as a QAA subject/institutional expert panel chair or a expert panel member in UK, Greece, Cyprus and Lithuania (2010-) by having completed over 20 QAA assignment reviews at programmatic, departmental and institutional level. In 2021/22, he was one of the advisory group members for the development of the QAA subject benchmark statement in computing (2022). In 2025, he was invited as an advisory group member for uplifting Maths (British Computer Society) at a pre-University level.

His research is on smart systems and applications,  social graphs for network and big data analytics as well as on developing data push and resource provisioning services in IoT and inter-clouds for a number of settings including disaster management. He has produced notable research in evacuation systems, using Wi-Fi rays to identify human reasonance in enclosed spaces and developed collaborative techniques for identifying polution in lakes in South US. He was a visiting scientist at ETH Z (2017) and a visiting professor at University of Seville (2014). He is a funded proposals' reviewer and involved in a number of funded research and KTP projects worth over £15m. He led REF submissions in 2014 and 2020 and led his department acquire significant external funding. He is listed in the 5%-10% of World, European and National  ranking lists.

Nik has published over 330 works and won 4 best papers awards. His edited book on Big Data and Internet of Things (2014) attracted over 700 citations and over 150,000 downloads (a pioneer, top-25 A.I. title on Amazon at the time). According to Google scholar, his h-index is 41. Professor Bessis has assessed over 40 Professorship conferments, examined over 40 PhD theses world-wide, organised over 40 conferences, serving as an editor of several books, special issues and the founding editor-in-chief of a refereed international journal, the International Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies (IJDST).  

In 2015/16, Nik led the development of the Tech Hub building, home of the Computer Science and Engineering departments.  The Tech Hub was a significant addition to the University campus. The £13m (including £3m grant from the Lancashire LEP) building houses one of the very few Harvard style lecture theaters, a state of the art Connect space for experimenting with advanced technology, the first 4k computer assisted virtual environment (CAVE) in UK, an advanced games lab, a total of 14 labs, a Sawyer Robot (Cobot), a Pepper Robot, 2 NAO robots, Dobot M1 and Dobot Magicians, Hololences, eye-trackers, multitouch displays, Z Space, high end GPU servers etc. At the time, it was probably the most advanced equipped department in the UK. 

Prior to his affiliation with EHU, he was with University of Derby, UK as a Professor of Computer Science and a Director of the Distributed and Intelligent Systems research centre (2010-2015). He started his academic career with University of Bedfordshire, UK as a Lecturer and progressed to a Principal Lecturer (2001-2010).